[StarMiner] - ARM controller image for your ASIC mining needs!

[starsoccer9]

Okay thanks, I tried to flash an sd card I have with the image but my pi turns on and gives me a steady red light with an occasional yellow light blink. I tried finding its IP on my network but cant seem to find anything.

There should be a series of lights like a NIC card would have near that red light if you have a proper and active network connection via the RJ-45 port on the Raspberry Pi.  Sounds like you have either (1) a bad network cable, or (2) the Raspberry has a bad RJ-45 port.  Try a different cable and see how that works which is the simpler of the two trouble shooting wise.

I will give it another shot, but it isnt the ethernet cable. For future versions you should consider having it try to dedicate an IP. So for example it uses .132 and if not free it goes to the closes free one up. so if .133 is not free it would take .134

edit: seems to work now. Since it is running cgminer, it should support all hardware cgminer supports right? For example butterflylabs 60ghash asics, or even hashfast?

[LinuxETC]

Okay thanks, I tried to flash an sd card I have with the image but my pi turns on and gives me a steady red light with an occasional yellow light blink. I tried finding its IP on my network but cant seem to find anything.

There should be a series of lights like a NIC card would have near that red light if you have a proper and active network connection via the RJ-45 port on the Raspberry Pi.  Sounds like you have either (1) a bad network cable, or (2) the Raspberry has a bad RJ-45 port.  Try a different cable and see how that works which is the simpler of the two trouble shooting wise.

I will give it another shot, but it isnt the ethernet cable. For future versions you should consider having it try to dedicate an IP. So for example it uses .132 and if not free it goes to the closes free one up. so if .133 is not free it would take .134

edit: seems to work now. Since it is running cgminer, it should support all hardware cgminer supports right? For example butterflylabs 60ghash asics, or even hashfast?

One can change the network settings with wicd-curses for reference and assign a static IP address if that is desired.  The reason for using DHCP is that not everyone uses a private class C network address (e.g., 192.168.x.y) on personal networks since there is also the private class B and private class A ranges as well.

As for "other ASIC hardware support", these versions of cgminer are compiled specifically for Gridseed and Zeus Miner ASIC devices, and Scriptor FPGA devices.  If one wanted to hand compile other ASIC hardware, it is possible for these to be used with StarMiner with the proper configuration and settings provided the API's are relatively current as well.  However, at this time we (the "StarMiner crew") are limiting what we can support with what ASIC hardware units and ARM hardware platforms we have "on hand" to support with StarMiner accordingly.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[starsoccer9]

Okay thanks, I tried to flash an sd card I have with the image but my pi turns on and gives me a steady red light with an occasional yellow light blink. I tried finding its IP on my network but cant seem to find anything.

There should be a series of lights like a NIC card would have near that red light if you have a proper and active network connection via the RJ-45 port on the Raspberry Pi.  Sounds like you have either (1) a bad network cable, or (2) the Raspberry has a bad RJ-45 port.  Try a different cable and see how that works which is the simpler of the two trouble shooting wise.

I will give it another shot, but it isnt the ethernet cable. For future versions you should consider having it try to dedicate an IP. So for example it uses .132 and if not free it goes to the closes free one up. so if .133 is not free it would take .134

edit: seems to work now. Since it is running cgminer, it should support all hardware cgminer supports right? For example butterflylabs 60ghash asics, or even hashfast?

One can change the network settings with wicd-curses for reference and assign a static IP address if that is desired.  The reason for using DHCP is that not everyone uses a private class C network address (e.g., 192.168.x.y) on personal networks since there is also the private class B and private class A ranges as well.

As for "other ASIC hardware support", these versions of cgminer are compiled specifically for Gridseed and Zeus Miner ASIC devices, and Scriptor FPGA devices.  If one wanted to hand compile other ASIC hardware, it is possible for these to be used with StarMiner with the proper configuration and settings provided the API's are relatively current as well.  However, at this time we (the "StarMiner crew") are limiting what we can support with what ASIC hardware units and ARM hardware platforms we have "on hand" to support with StarMiner accordingly.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

oo okay, thanks for the info. Just disappointed no one has a mining distribution for the PI or beagle bone that supports all the asics cgminer or bfgminer does out of the box. For people like me who have never compiled anything but tried it becomes a huge pain.

[LinuxETC]

oo okay, thanks for the info. Just disappointed no one has a mining distribution for the PI or beagle bone that supports all the asics cgminer or bfgminer does out of the box. For people like me who have never compiled anything but tried it becomes a huge pain.

If you would like to have support for specific ASIC hardware or ARM hardware, we do gladly accept donations of such or even contracted work requests for such.  We also do reach out to the various ASIC hardware vendors, however (and as noted by nwoolls a time or two), they seem to prefer to push out mining hardware first, and worry about mining software later.   So posting request for support of StarMiner on their particular hardware forum threads does help get the hardware vendors attention (which was the case for Zeus Miner for example).

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[starsoccer9]

oo okay, thanks for the info. Just disappointed no one has a mining distribution for the PI or beagle bone that supports all the asics cgminer or bfgminer does out of the box. For people like me who have never compiled anything but tried it becomes a huge pain.

If you would like to have support for specific ASIC hardware or ARM hardware, we do gladly accept donations of such or even contracted work requests for such.  We also do reach out to the various ASIC hardware vendors, however (and as noted by nwoolls a time or two), they seem to prefer to push out mining hardware first, and worry about mining software later.   So posting request for support of StarMiner on their particular hardware forum threads does help get the hardware vendors attention (which was the case for Zeus Miner for example).

Happy and profitable mining to all!

Sadly hashfast is going most likely bankrupt, so I dont think posting would do much.  I would for sure consider donating if you got hashfast support in. Which as far as I am aware is more/less just adding a flag when compiling cgminer. If you need someone to test it I would ofcourse.

[pr0d1gy]

Installation and use is pretty simple.

But I do have a question. Got my Thunder x3 hooked up, and in the first 60 seconds the HW is over 2000, should I be worried?

Rate                  Pool           Accept/Reject   HW
31020 Kh/s   N/A      18 / 0  0.00%   2084


Nothing turns red on the web console till about 6 mins, then its like

Rate                  Pool           Accept/Reject   HW
30410 Kh/s   N/A            121 / 1 0.82%   12707

[LinuxETC]

Installation and use is pretty simple.

But I do have a question. Got my Thunder x3 hooked up, and in the first 60 seconds the HW is over 2000, should I be worried?

Rate                  Pool           Accept/Reject   HW
31020 Kh/s   N/A      18 / 0  0.00%   2084


Nothing turns red on the web console till about 6 mins, then its like

Rate                  Pool           Accept/Reject   HW
30410 Kh/s   N/A            121 / 1 0.82%   12707

You can change the "alerts" in the webUI's configuration page on the HW errors.  Your reject rate though is quite low, so I would not be too worried about it (this is an ASIC after all versus a GPU).  If there was a high amount of rejects with the hardware errors, then I would be concerned.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[LinuxETC]

Folks:

Due to the announcement and release of the Raspberry Pi "Model B+", we (Linux ETC) are temporarily suspending the sales of the Raspberry Pi "Model B" + StarMiner combination sets.  We are reviewing the specifications of this new model which is a "slight improvement" over the original "Model B" and will advise accordingly about StarMiner support on this newer Raspberry Pi "Model B+" version.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[chulo]

Does Starminer support The War Machine (gawminer) out of the box now?

[LinuxETC]

Does Starminer support The War Machine (gawminer) out of the box now?

There is a profile for "War Machine" via the webUI, so yes there is a configuration for this particular ASIC unit on StarMiner.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[chulo]

Tried starminer.

Guess something is wrong with my warmachine - going to RMA it.  Too many hardware errors and eventually stops mining.

[LinuxETC]

Tried starminer.

Guess something is wrong with my warmachine - going to RMA it.  Too many hardware errors and eventually stops mining.

Most of the Zeus Miner ASIC units (which include the GAW "rebranded" ASIC units as well) show a high amount of hardware error messages.  What one needs to consider (which is noted on our LitecoinTalk.org forum thread) is the actually accepted versus rejected share numbers.  The Zeus Miner "Blizzard" units the "StarMiner crew" has for development purposes both show eventually a high number of hardware errors.  To minimize this some requires adjust the clock frequency some (we have found that 342Mhz is typically "acceptable" for most Zeus Miner ASIC units; originally most were reporting 327Mhz was also a relatively "acceptable" frequency as well).  However, the percentage of rejects is extremely low relatively speaking as well.  One just needs to go into the SeedManager configuration page to adjust the "hardware error warning" to a high number to overlook this in the long term.

As for "eventually stops mining", there were reports of this with quite a few of the Zeus Miner "first batch/generation" units due to various reasons as well as speculations.  StarMiner for the majority of cases though was able to work well with these ASIC units that other mining applications and full images had issues with.  That said, "a majority" means that not every ASIC would perform well either.   Such happens unfortunately. 

Good luck with the RMA with GAW Miners there.  Feel free to continue reporting about StarMiner here or on our LitecoinTalk forum thread as well.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[LinuxETC]

For those concerned about the recent announcement of the bash vulnerability (CVE-2014-6271) in regards to StarMiner, this can be addressed by the following which would be executed on the command line as root (either SSH into StarMiner or via the direct console):

Code:

aptitude clean;aptitude autoclean;aptitude update;aptitude install bash

Please do note, this is a partial patch or fix at this time since most Linux distributions have not implemented a full patch just yet (including the maintainers of bash itself as of earlier this afternoon, 25 September 2014, US Mountain Time).  So plan on running the above again early next week as well to address this CVE.

Any thoughts or concerns are welcomed to be posted here on the forums accordingly.

Happy and profitable mining to all!

[Androidicus]

Hi LinuxETC

Does the either 15th Jun 2014 and/or the latest version of StarMiner support 'Extranonce Subscription' i.e. used by NiceHash?

Many thanks

[LinuxETC]

Hi LinuxETC

Does the either 15th Jun 2014 and/or the latest version of StarMiner support 'Extranonce Subscription' i.e. used by NiceHash?

Many thanks

Unfortunately not at this time.  dmaxl's cgminer fork is based from the master branch of cklovias, and I seem to recall that there was a merge request of this feature which was rejected a few days ago from cklovias' master branch. 

Happy and profitable mining to all!